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Goodman’s Ui is a master of comic
solecism in Alistair Beaton’s nicely tweaked script, in which he mauls
Shakespeare’s famous ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech with a thick
Brooklyn accent.

Not just a knock-about comedy in the
vein of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, this has a serious point to make:
namely that a Berlusconian buffoon can become a mass murderer.

As a result, the play is, in part, a
history lesson, with the ominous burning down of the Reichstag in 1933
and the annexation of Austria in 1938 replaced by arson in a warehouse
and the takeover of another gang’s patch.

Yet for all the historical
point-scoring, the show can be enjoyed as a classic gangster spoof.
Against a film noir backdrop matching Chicago’s fire escapes with
Berlin’s beer halls, Michael Feast and Joe McGann have a high time as
Ui’s dapper henchmen.

They are always handy with a wisecrack
about their sinister trade in enforced protection: ‘No violence,’ they
assure their victims, ‘just emphasis.’